By Jenn Lipes
When I first joined Arcadis in the fall of 2014, I worked predominately in our talent acquisitions department supporting our environment business line. As a recruiter, you work tirelessly to fill the never-ending demand of open positions, and at that time we were also seeing a lot of people leaving the company.
As someone who likes numbers, I saw that our recruitment teams collective hiring efforts were breaking even with the turnover figures. That’s when I decided I also wanted to get into the onboarding processes and employee engagement to ensure that we not only hired great people, but that our employees stayed because they loved to work here. I buckled down and joined an onboarding team both locally in North America and globally working on an onboarding tool. (Have you explored the onboarding tool yet? Check it out here www.arcadisonboarding.com).
The Arcadis Onboarding Experience
Fast forward 3+ years later, and I get to work on an even greater employee engagement project: our Employee Value Proposition (EVP). What is an EVP you ask? It certainly is different depending on which companies you look at, but here at Arcadis our EVP both externally and internally is our unique positioning for what makes Arcadis a great place to work. It captures what Arcadians like about their job, more than just our unified mission of Improving Quality of Life.
Initially we worked on this in Continental Europe, however we quickly realized the UK was also creating something similar. In December of last year, we united, also with global, to define one Employee Value Proposition. With help from the vendor BrandPie, we identified four categories that differentiate Arcadis: our projects, people, opportunities, and flexibility/empowerment.
Then (2015) and now (2018)
We are now compiling a tool kit with an overall framework and guidelines of how to adapt in each region. We found that in the different regions of Arcadis, there are some nuances in the ways that people are motivated and engaged, but overall, we all have similar themes that can be highlighted globally. I’m really looking forward to the roll-out, not only to be able to capture talented new employees, but also to internally boost the engagement of all Arcadians. Do you have ideas of what makes Arcadis a great place to work? Please share them with me!
